Tag Archives: interface

Korg Nano

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Un trio di controller USB prodotti da Korg, utili, piccoli e abbastanza economici (€ 59 ciascuno).

  • Il nanoKONTROL ha 9 slider MIDI (controlli continui), altrettanti potenziometri, 18 pulsanti e una sezione di transport.
  • Il nanoPAD possiede 12 pad sensibili alla dinamica, ognuno capace anche di inviare fino a 8 messaggi MIDI (note o controlli). Inoltre ha un touchpad X-Y.
  • nanoKEY, infine, è una tastiera con 25 tasti, valocity sensitive, 8va mobile, pitch bender e modulation wheel.

Disponibili nei due colori visibili in foto.

Theremin come controller

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Pochi sanno che la Moog ha un canale su You Tube. E non molti sanno che Moog è anche uno dei più grandi produttori di Theremin. L’ultimo modello è l’Etherwave Plus.

Recentemente Moog ha esteso l’area di utilizzo dell’Etherwave Plus, impiegandolo come controller di una apparecchiatura analogica. In questo video lo si vede controllare il filtro di una Moog guitar con l’effetto di agire sul timbro di quest’ultima.

Dal punto di vista di un elettronico, il giochino è banale perché una tensione è una tensione, da qualsiasi parte venga e da qualsiasi cosa sia generata, tuttavia mostra chiaramente come il mondo dei controller audio potrebbe essere esteso in molti modi.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

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“The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World” by David A. Jaffe is a piano concerto performed by a percussionist. It is the premier work for a new hybrid acoustic instrument, the “Radio-Drum-driven Disklavier,” which allows the gestural vocabulary of a percussionist to speak with the voice of an acoustic grand piano. The sound of this new instrument is massive and grand, even monumental, giving a new sense to the word “pianistic”, and is further extended by a unique ensemble of acoustic plucked string and percussion instruments. All sound is entirely acoustic and performed as it would be in a concert setting–there are no loudspeakers, electronic sound or over-dubbing.

Commissioned by a National Endowment for the Arts Collaborative Fellowship, it involved a collaboration between composer David A. Jaffe and percussionist Andrew Schloss. The two worked as Resident Artists at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1992-1993, where they developed the new instrument and refined the solo part. The work was released on CD in October, 1996 on the Well-Tempered productions label. The premiere live performance was January 20, 1998 by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at the Yerba Buena Theatre in San Francisco.

This clip an excerpt from movement 5, “The Temple of Artemis.” the Mother Goddess (Ephesus, Turkey; 360 B.C.) Artemis, known also as Dianna, was the most revered and powerful goddess of Asia. Her sacred house at Ephasus inspired Philon to write, some 300 years later, “He who has laid eyes on it once will be convinced that the world of the immortal gods has moved from the heaven to earth.” The music serves as the climactic center-piece of the entire work, and is an unbridled ecstatic celebration of this goddess of wild animals to the Greeks, and of all Nature and motherhood to peoples farther East. It depicts a gradually-coalescing religious procession, focused on the carrying of the cult statue, and suggests the collisions of cultural influences that resulted as such pilgrims encountered one another, while migrating West. The musical cultural references are draw from around the world, ranging from jazz to popular music to folk musics from Ireland, Mexico, Spain and the American Appalachians, suggesting the vastness of Artemis’ influence and the rapidly-changing cosmology of the time.[Author’s notes]

Varie note sul brano sul sito di Jaffe.

New Musical Instruments: Audiopad

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Audiopad has been developed by two MIT graduate students (James Patten and Ben Recht). It is one of the most interesting and futuristic musical controller ever seen in action.
Audiopad itself has its sound sample library and can play music and apply digital processing at the same time but can also control a real time synthesis software like MAX/MSP running on external computer or even a set of MIDI synthesizers.
Basically Audiopad is composed by a tabletop surface (a sort of big horizontal screen) on which different symbols and musical data are displayed. On the tabletop there are objects the performer can move. Audiopad generate music looking at the motion of that objects and their position with respect to the displayed symbols.
Depending on the software, the symbols type and their meaning can be different and so is the interaction with objects. Example: symbols can represent instruments and an object can be a melody. Moving the object on a symbol means that the performer assign that melody to that instrument. Another object can be a microphone, so moving the microphone near/far a melody or instrument raise/lower it’s volume.
Moreover the tabletop display is not static but can change when the performer moves the object on certain symbols opening new ways to the performer action.
Audiopad is very different from traditional computer interaction (the desk, monitor, keyboard and mouse model). The best way to understand it’s nature is seeing in action.
Unfortunately Audiopad is not currently for sale. The only musical interface that moves in that direction is Lemur (we’ll speak about later), but it’s only a programming touch-screen, a single step with respect to Audiopad complexity.